Manufacturing, USA vs. Abroad

Lately, I’ve been looking for manufacturers for an injection molded project I’m working on. Requirements at my previous job forced us to source parts in the US, and most of our work was CNC’d aluminum, so exploring overseas suppliers is a new prospect for me. There are some clear advantages to staying in the US and I thought I’d talk about the pros and cons running through my head. Trust The first concern I have with a supplier is trust. Can I trust them to make quality goods and deliver on time? In the US, I feel like basic interview questions and social cues will lead me to conclude whether you’re a worthy supplier or not. I can call you on the phone (because at most you are a few time zones away!), communicate with you in fluent English, and also check your references, who probably also speak English. If […]

People Still Pay for Hardware

People Still Pay for Hardware

I was scratching my head one day in the wake Instagram’s Billion (with a “B”) dollar buyout. I began reconsidering my career path and whether I should have been a programmer and UI developer instead of a mechanical engineer. I’m sure many people were thinking the same thing. Any rock you turn over these days seems to have a mess of ambitious social media start ups crawling around under it. Of course, not everyone can be successful, and with the way the internet allows things to scale, the gap between the successful and unsuccessful has grown ever larger. In many ways, I think social media start ups are starting to resemble Hollywood and the movie studio approach: they might make a lot of bad films, but if the blockbuster hits…it’s BIG. I was recently talking to a developer who had worked on a new social media app. It had taken a small […]

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs As It Applies to Engineering

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs As It Applies to Engineering


Social Engineering (And Not the Kind In Your Spam Folder)

Social Engineering (And Not the Kind In Your Spam Folder)


Finishing Projects

Finishing Projects

As a naturally curious person, I find I’m often researching new subjects, learning new skills, and trying new things. (I’m sure you can relate, but Wikipedia is like a big giant black hole of time.) This typically means I have a lot of half-developed talents and unfinished projects. I actually did finish a (small) project lately, and it got me thinking about what the difference in motivation is between projects I start and finish and those I abandon. In this instance, the small project happened to be an engagement website (for myself and my new fiance! I guess this is what happens when engineers get married…) Now I wrote an article a while ago about the difference between academic vs. “real” programming, and I’d been meaning to learn some web development lately. Learning to program “real code”  was sort of a vague, ephemeral goal, but the engagement website and server was a tangible, defined thing, […]

Open Source and Why People Don't Steal Ideas

Open Source and Why People Don’t Steal Ideas

Lately, I’ve been hanging around some hacker spaces in the Boston area, meeting people, and seeing what they’re making. One thing that really astounds me is the amount of technical knowledge people share for free. I mean, the work I see is the fruit of highly skilled, highly technical labor… people doing circuit board designs and layouts, writing control loops, developing ethernet boards to connect little hobby gadgets to the internet… in short, really cool stuff. My initial reaction was to say “This is worth money! Why are you just giving it away?” but of course, at a certain point, money just isn’t a motivating factor. For so called “knowledge workers,” developing news skills and mastering them was the intrinsic reason for putting so much time and effort in to these projects. Here it was first hand: for the scientists and engineers in the area, making something cool was more valuable than the […]

Degree? We don’t need no stinkin’ degree!


The Effect of Proximity
